Just wait ’til next year!
Yes, it’s awful to wave the white flag already, but for the woeful Colorado Rockies — who open their season Monday — baseball’s eternal end-of-season rallying cry unfortunately appears to be the appropriate sentiment.
While every other team in the National League West made deals over the winter that arguably will improve their lot, the Rockies — who have averaged a pitiful 93 losses over each of the last four seasons — virtually stood pat.
And oddsmakers and baseball insiders alike give the denizens of Coors Field little likelihood of improving dramatically this year.
Sure, there’s always the chance that stars Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez can carry the team — assuming that both can stay healthy all season, contrary to their track records. Indeed, the Rockies’ day-to-day lineup actually compares well against any other team.
But as the World Series-winning San Francisco Giants (spit) proved once again, pitching wins championships, and the Rockies’ best hopes rest on the developing young arms of Jonathan Gray and Eddie Butler, both of whom are projected to be at least a season or two away from breaking out.
It’s hard to place the blame for the on-the-field woes entirely on the flinty Monfort brothers who own the team, in part because it’s impossible to lure front-line free-agent pitchers to come to Colorado, where the thin air inflates their earned-run averages and deflates their self-esteem.
So the prevailing sentiment in the franchise’s history has been to load the lineup with a bunch of sluggers and hope to outscore the other team. While 15-12 slugfests can be amusing — especially for the typical football-crazed, attention-deficit-disordered Colorado crowd — it typically doesn’t make for winning baseball over the course of the long season.
In light of that, the Rockies could adopt some ideas to make the games entertaining, even to purists like me:
• Cut the price of beer to $5. (Craft beers last season were $7; “regular” beers started at $6.50.) Arte Moreno cut beer prices as his first move after buying the Los Angeles Angels in 2003 and, predictably, it made him very popular among the fans. If nothing else, keeping the suds flowing will make Colorado fans forget about Dick Monfort’s derisive e-mail replies to their pleas for a better product on the field.
• Ditch the awful cacophony of pop music between every inning. (Yeah, I know: If the music is too loud, I’m too old. But the songs always come across as muddy and indecipherable, no matter how much the organization crows about improvements in its sound system.) Bring back the organ for a nostalgic feel, at least on weeknight games for us — ahem — old codgers.
• Turn one or more concession stands into a rotating outlet for food from the visiting team’s ballpark. Imagine biting into a Dodger Dog while Los Angeles’ Clayton Kershaw carves up the Rockies. Let your mouth water over the garlic fries from San Francisco’s AT&T Park as the Giants’ Buster Posey bangs cream-puff pitches to the wall. Drown your sorrows in a Budweiser while the St. Louis Cardinals turn the basepaths into a merry-go-round — especially if it costs only $5.
• Spell “Tulowitzki” correctly on the give-away T-shirts, unlike what happened last year.
• Speaking of give-aways, coupons for discounted haircuts don’t … um … cut it. Bobblehead dolls, T-shirts, beer mugs (for those $5 brewskis) all are great. Also, stage the give-aways on sparsely attended weeknight games, rather than on weekends, when the turnstiles already are spinning.
No, once again, this will not be the Rockies’ year, but we fans need to keep the faith.
Anyone can root for a front-runner or jump on the bandwagon of a perennial powerhouse. But ask any Chicago Cubs fan, and you’ll learn that the true measure of loyalty comes through season after season of cellar finishes and calamitous collapses.
It’s important to remember that every team, no matter how bad, can be counted on to win 60 games in a season. So good things can happen on any one visit to Coors Field — even if it’s just enjoying a ballgame on a beautiful summer evening.
But it would help if the beer is cheap.
Steve Lipsher (slipsher@comcast.net) of Silverthorne writes a monthly column for The Denver Post.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit or check out our for how to submit by e-mail or mail.
